In the past, the United States has been dependent upon foreign oil. In the 1970s, foreign oil was thought by many to be the major reason for a recession in the U.S. as the oil was withheld from the market, driving the price of gasoline up as the demand continued to grow. As a result of this dependency, the Federal Government put a 55 mile-per-hour speed limit into effect while the U.S. auto industry began a fuel economy program that has extended to the present time.
There is nothing new about rethinking the automotive power system; it has long been known that the internal combustion engine (the Otto cycle) has inherent inefficiencies which may be on the order of 30% efficient. E. F. Lindsley from his September 1979 Popular Science article entitled “More Miles From a Barrel of Crude” stated as follows                “ . . . To get ourselves out of this trap, some experts contend, we're going to have to go back and examine the entire combustion process in detail, finding new ways of igniting and burning fuel. Then we'll have to redesign engines that cannot only get better mileage, but run on fuels that can be extracted in greater quantity from each barrel of crude . . . ”        
While fuel injection, turbo-charging and super charging, as well as alternate fuels such as ethanol and E-85 have been successfully implemented in the past, they still have some drawbacks. The most salient of these drawbacks is that they still require relatively high amounts of gasoline or ethanol-based fuel.
Consequently, there exists a need for improved methods and systems for fueling and ignition of fuel in an internal combustion engine.